Hey guys. Just wanted to say, I've been testing the beta of Blender 2.8 tonight and I was wondering if anyone else tried it. It's been a while since last I posted here, so I thought I'd share my impressions if that interests someone - personally I'm having fun writing it.

Too-long-didn't-read version: the new UI is meh, the controls changed a lot but seem better, and a lot of features we unfortunately can't use.

Verbose version

The new Blender is trying to cater to new users, since a lot of what we know changed to make it look and behave more like 3DsMax / Maya. Most importantly, the UI was redesigned (again), and a lot of hotkeys were changed.

New hotkeys and controls: annoying, but overall better

I think you can still use the old hotkeys, but by default a number of them have been changed. Takes some getting used to, but overall it seems it should make things easier in the long run.Some tools are directly in the 3D view now, which makes it a bit more intuitive (they can be toggled off if you don't use them, which is cool).There are a few nice modifications too, like being able to use more than 20 layers. Some UI elements have been redesigned or moved to better location, which is overall better. But yeah, it can be rather alien at first.

Bad point: the interface

If you ignore the new controls, visually the interface itself is... Really "meh". The text are more blurry (actually because of a shadow effect underneath them), I don't like either the "dark" or "light" skin either, but fortunately you can customize the colors if you don't mind fiddling with the settings. You can end up with something decent if you copy all the settings from the old Blender.What you CAN'T customize, is the icons. Not an opinion but a fact: the icons are TERRIBLE. They aren't colored, they aren't greyscale either, they are full black-or-white. Which means you can't easily identify them like in 2.7. Not only that, but some of the drawings just don't depict anything meaningful. Used with the default black theme, it makes the interface a whole dark busy mess.

Bad point: compatibility with old files and Plasma itself

Maybe just an effect of being in beta, but I can't open a Blender 2.7 file in 2.8. You can however use the "File→Append" option, but then your whole scene is read-only, with Blender complaining about objects being "linked" when you attempt to edit them. Go figure...Also, the old renderer was thrown outside the window in favor of both Cycles and the new Eevee. Normally this would be a good thing, but those renderers don't work at all like Plasma's. I don't know how Korman will deal with that, since the material editor is quite different and lightmap baking might have changed too... I think this is going to be a pain to Hoikas

Good point: the 3D viewport

It took me 5 minutes to figure out why it felt so different: the viewport doesn't stutter anymore when you're moving in the scene.And according to Blender's website, it's now capable of displaying much more complex lighting and reflection effects, which unfortunately won't be useful to Plasma. Ah, damn...

Anyway. The new viewport rendering looks sexy, even though it's incompatible with Plasma. I think I'm going to keep using both versions... Although I would be interested in knowing what you people think about it.

The last time someone asked about upgrading Blender Internal materials to Eevee, there was a deafening silence on the mailing lists. Korman is unlikely to jump directly to Blender 2.80. I expect when real workloads start migrating over to Blender 2.8x, we may see some progress on that front. I hope.

Sirius wrote:I don't know how Korman will deal with that, since the material editor is quite different and lightmap baking might have changed too... I think this is going to be a pain to Hoikas

I've been using it, too, and I agree with your general assessment. Some of the earlier alphas were pretty rough, but I think I see what they're going for with the UI layout changes, and I hope they'll continue to refine it once people are using it and giving feedback. The icons are terrible, and unfortunately this is just them following a stupid trend in idiotic design of making icons less readable by dropping all color.

As for Korman... yeah... this is going to be a problem for us. Age builders will need to keep using 2.79 until the full scope of the changes are known and we can assess what strategy (if at all possible) we have for going forward.

Yes, this doesn't surprise me. Fortunately, Blender 2.79 is both recent and decent, so we can stick with it for quite a while.It would be cool if plugins could easily swap Blender's renderer with a custom one, so that you could have Plasma's renderer running in the Blender 3D viewport. I doubt that's feasible, but oh well...

Deledrius wrote:The icons are terrible, and unfortunately this is just them following a stupid trend in idiotic design of making icons less readable by dropping all color.

Yeah, the latest Gimp suffers from it too, unfortunately...In Blender's case, it can be somewhat justified by the fact that they moved from bitmap icons to vectorized ones (to account for monitors with high pixel densities - it's also why you can no longer provide your own icon set in the preferences). Maybe colors and gradients aren't really efficient to display for those. Still, I'd take a pixelated icon over a B&W one anyway. Hopefully overriding the icons will be possible in a future release.

Well, if you put aside the icons, it's cool to see Blender constantly being updated. It's toe-to-toe with other softwares like Maya, Cinema4D &co, which isn't a small feat considering it's 100% free and open source. Too bad it makes it harder for us to keep up with the trend, though

Yes, this doesn't surprise me. Fortunately, Blender 2.79 is both recent and decent, so we can stick with it for quite a while.It would be cool if plugins could easily swap Blender's renderer with a custom one, so that you could have Plasma's renderer running in the Blender 3D viewport. I doubt that's feasible, but oh well...

It's been talked about. This would definitely be a great feature to have. Not easy to do, though.

Sirius wrote:

Deledrius wrote:The icons are terrible, and unfortunately this is just them following a stupid trend in idiotic design of making icons less readable by dropping all color.

Yeah, the latest Gimp suffers from it too, unfortunately...In Blender's case, it can be somewhat justified by the fact that they moved from bitmap icons to vectorized ones (to account for monitors with high pixel densities - it's also why you can no longer provide your own icon set in the preferences). Maybe colors and gradients aren't really efficient to display for those. Still, I'd take a pixelated icon over a B&W one anyway. Hopefully overriding the icons will be possible in a future release.

It's true, and I hate it there, too. Everyone seems to be doing this. The open source projects are late to this stupid party, but all the big professional designers (at Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, et al) seem to think that flat, color-less, small icons are better. Whoever this imaginary audience is that finds this good, it does not include me. It has nothing to do with vectors; you can make the old icons in color and with proper gradients fine. This was an "artistic" decision near as I can tell. I do hope we can customize them soon. I'm sure someone will have a better icon theme set.

Sirius wrote:Well, if you put aside the icons, it's cool to see Blender constantly being updated. It's toe-to-toe with other softwares like Maya, Cinema4D &co, which isn't a small feat considering it's 100% free and open source. Too bad it makes it harder for us to keep up with the trend, though

I agree.

Anyway, this was always a danger in tying the plugin so tightly to the program, and I remain hopeful that we'll find a path forward.

I have been trying blender 2.8 for a few month now and started with it before it was beta.There have been lots of changes during that time.

But i actualy like it.The collection are usefull for bigger projects.The multiple object editing has som advantages with texturing.The easy to find different user interfaces for sculpting, editing painting animation etc are very convenient and better suited for 16:9 screensThe easy to use measuring tools for distances and angles. are great for CAD purposes.I use it for my 3D printer, unfortunately there are still bugs when exporting to .stl i noticed.so you can't trust the sizes.

Eh, it's readable, but scale it down to about 50% of the original size and those oreos won't look like anything anymore now that they are 18 pixels wide (BTW, are Oreos a new form of browser cookie required for authentication ? )

dendwaler wrote:yes i agree the icons are not what i prefer, but that will change again soon i hope ,because we are not alone in this, seeing the pol in this thread

Yes indeed, and some have already started proposing better designs, which is good. I'm sure we will have the option to replace those icons eventually...

dendwaler wrote:But i actualy like it.The collection are usefull for bigger projects.The multiple object editing has som advantages with texturing.The easy to find different user interfaces for sculpting, editing painting animation etc are very convenient and better suited for 16:9 screensThe easy to use measuring tools for distances and angles. are great for CAD purposes.

I agree with all of this. They are really looking to improve all areas of Blender.

It's amazing all you can do with Blender nowadays. I sometime use it to do some video editing, 2D animations or icon design (I'm too lazy to learn another software). They removed the game engine from the official 2.8 branch though... It's a bit sad, but I guess people didn't really use it much anyway.